Doctor Livingstone I Assume

Maybe you remember that old Star Trek episode called, I, Mudd?  It's the one where a businessman takes the crew hostage, to be guarded by a bunch of androids.  The crew starts dong a bunch of crazy things that cause the androids to shut down because the antics don't make sense, and the crew escapes once again.

This is what happens to my wife when she asks me something like, "Is sour cream still goot [sic] or no?"  I reply, "If the cream is already sour, exactly what criteria are we using to determine if it is good?  If you mean is it green yet, then I have to say it's still good."  I mean, the cream was sweet and fresh at one time, but it was allowed to go sour.  It smells sour and tastes sour, and by most standards that would not be good.

It's amazing how many assumptions we make in our daily lives that heavily influence our thinking.  What's more, our inner scale for judging the real world slides around, depending on what set of initial assumptions we make about a particular subject.

Take the anti-Ahok rally in Jakarta today.  Most people here could care less about Ahok, but this morning I can hear people running around the neighborhood yelling, "There's free food at the Ahok rally!  Let's go!"  If you have a hidden agenda to bring down the current administration and install your personal allies, this is good.  If you are a typical Indonesian who thinks anything free is better than nothing and you will go to any expense to get it, this is good.  If you are reasonably intelligent and like Ahok, this is bad.  It's all relative.

By the way, we really need heavy rains in central Jakarta today, so send some our way, because normally this would be a bad thing, but today it will break up a mass demonstration before it can get violent, and that's good.

Another good example of this phenomenon is the Trump Wave.  Most of the people who support Trump do so because they are sick and tired of corporate interests running the government against the interests of most everyday folks.  So, they get behind a man who is a walking brand name and quintessential CEO of a marketing empire.  Is this a kind of fire break?  To fight a forest fire, you start another fire?  Again, it's a case of assumptions, not to mention a lot of pretty words, coloring decisions.

Just because an apple is red and succulent-looking on the outside doesn't mean it is not shot through with worms.

We assume that vaccines work because...well, gosh, we've never had polio, right?  We assume a restaurant makes healthy food because they passed health inspection, right?  We assume the Sun will rise tomorrow because it has for the previous 20,158 days we've been alive, and by all accounts it has for a long time before we were here, though we assume that those records are really as old as we think they are.

When it comes right down to it, we actually know very little.  Basically, we know what we have experienced, but that is only valid for time already past.  The current status of what we know is just what we see, feel, smell, hear, and taste right this very moment.  All of that could change in the next minute, everything outside the range of our senses is unknown, and all past experience is based solely on our memories, which are provably dodgy sorts of things.

In fact, we are completely clueless.  What we know right now is not provable unless we have someone else to confirm it at the same time, but then we could both be under the same illusion of assumptions.

As Ram Dass exhorted us back in the day, "Be here now."  However, if you have ever really tried to live in the Eternal Now, you know it is virtually impossible to function in our collective cultures.  We actually need an entire truck-load of assumptions just to turn off the alarm in the morning, not the least of which that we can measure 'time' and that a morning will come for us to turn off the alarm.

Point of fact: assumptions are the foundation of our shared reality.  It cannot and does not exist without the basic assumptions that inform most of what we "know."

Perhaps you are one of us hippie-types who read Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land?  In the book, Heinlein posits a class of legal functionaries called "fair witnesses."  These people are trained to live in the Here-Now.  One of the main characters, Jubal Harshaw, demonstrates how it works when he asks his personal Fair Witness, "What color is that house?"  She responds, "It's white on this side."  In other words, she made no assumptions about the color of the house on the unseen sides, and reported only what she could directly experience.

What Heinlein failed to do, through his character, is point out that she assumed that what she experienced as the color 'white' is the same as everyone else who looked at it.

As I type this, I assume that there is a magic machine called a "computer" in front of me.  I can see the screen make squiggles that I assume mean something to objective observers.  I can feel the keys as I type.  I can smell the ozone coming from the heated components inside.  I assume that when I click "Publish," this machine will send a signal to some far off server that will render my experiences into something others can share.  I will only have some confirmation of these assumptions if the hit counter goes nuts and/or if someone sends a response, which I assume will be from a real human being somewhere else on what I assume is a planet that we co-inhabit.

As you can see, this line of deductive reasoning can get rather detailed and one can easily despair of trying to ascertain the Truth of any matter.  It is, however, a very good exercise in recognizing and coming to grips with the vast number of assumptions that we make moment by moment.

Many of the long-time readers here appreciate that I take a slightly different view of things, and I do that by first checking my assumptions, and those of other commentators, to see what - if anything - has been overlooked by our shared assumptions.  I attempt to point out that which has not been considered in the general discourse because we all made some common assumptions.

I do not claim to be special, or even a leader, in this effort.  I am simply trying to think clearly and to understand what assumptions I make about my daily experience.  With a bit of luck, I can share those observations with a wider audience who may - or may not - also appreciate these observations.

My wife just reported that most of the shops at the local bazaar that are owned by ethnic Chinese are closed.  This is because they have assumed that the Muslim-based mass demonstrations will erupt in violence, and that the violence will likely be directed towards ethnic Chinese.  These assumptions are based on either past experience in 1998 and other occasions, or on reports of those events.  Thus, they assume that it is better to stay home, unless their shop is close to where they live.  This last assumption is based on their perception of how fast they can get home in an emergency.

Yes, life is full of assumptions, and for the most part, we can't function without them.  It is important to analyze and understand what our assumptions are, so that we can avoid mistakes because of them.  We are much less likely to be caught off-guard when we are mindful of our foundational assumptions, and are much less prone to panic and more likely to think clearly.

In fact, I don't know for sure that I will be alive to finish this article.  I only assume, based on past experi...

Ass-U-Me Nothing

"The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens.  The remarkable fact is that all of the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin."
-- Dr. Lyall Watson, 1982, University of London (under Desmond Morris)

A great many people still labor under the impression that evolution is a proven fact.  In point of fact, it is no such thing.  For one thing, evolution posits that the many thousands of species on Earth descended from a single cell, and that mutations gave rise to new species over billions of years.

What we have actually witnessed is that no new species has ever been proved to branch off from another species.  In other words, cats have not been seen to have puppies due to mutation.  Also, mutated offspring, at best, cannot breed a subsequent generation or do not survive at all.

There is always talk of viruses mutating, but they never become bacteria or any other species than viruses.  Bacteria adjust to new environments by evolving immunity to various medications, but they do not become amoeba.

Few, if any, people read Darwin any more.  The theory of evolution has become so convoluted and patched up that it hardly resembles what Darwin wrote in his seminal book, On the Origin of Species.  What he observed, and all he speculated on, was that various species across groups of islands were observed to have evolved various mechanisms to adapt to their environments.  He certainly never said that environmental forces could lead to the spawning of new species, only that bird beak shapes varied according to forces within the local environment.

Darwinism certainly has sufficient proof that environmental factors lead to variations within a species across geographical areas.  The famous example of the moth species with dark and light color variations meant that darker ones would be more likely to get eaten than lighter ones depending on the color of the background.

Today, Darwinism more resembles the medieval theory of spontaneous generation than actual science.  Spontaneous generation held that various creatures erupted suddenly from various other creatures that resembled each other in some way.  The well-known example is geese leaping into existence from goose barnacles.  We hold this ancient theory to be absurd now, yet we continue to elevate Darwinism as hard science.

Let's say I write a doctoral thesis with one crucial error that is accepted by the faculty board.  I then go on to an illustrious teaching career in which I pass on my single error to 1,000 students.  Of those students, let's say 10% go on to teaching careers and they pass on the error as fact.  Within 20 years, you have 100,000 people who assume that my original error was fact and never bother to check it.  Furthermore, a significant number of them have careers that are dependent on grants and such based my single error.  How likely do you think they will be to give up that error and their nice jobs by questioning the status quo?

It's amazing how many educated people believe that human males have 25 ribs, while females have 26.  This involves two crucial assumptions: 1) that there is an actual physical phenomenon that requires supernatural explanation, and 2) that cutting off a finger means that all subsequent offspring will have one less finger.  Though many of us laugh at the absurdity of this belief, some cling to it even in the face of solid physical evidence, such as dissecting a human male cadaver.

Assumptions are powerful things.  We all are guilty of them.  We assume that the stores will have food, that water will come from the tap and that life goes on pretty much as we expect day after day.

Few of us stop to consider that once people fervently believed that we lived on a tortise shell supported by elephants, or that the Earth was the center of the Universe and all else revolved around it.  People died horrible deaths for questioning those paradigms, yet we dismiss them as primitive fantasies.  In the same manner, academics can commit professional suicide for questioning evolution, the Big Bang and the gravitational constant.  There is no fundamental difference between then and now.

History tells us that the only remedy for these kinds of dogmatic thinking are violent upheavals in society.  The Reformation and the Enlightenment are prime examples of this compulsion by humans to defend their assumptions to the death, even in the face of empirical evidence.

Some argue that we cannot throw out things like evolution because we have nothing with which to replace them.  So?  Is it better to believe in fantasies than to admit we don't know something?  Are we so sure that men have 25 ribs that we are unwilling to look at an anatomical textbook?  Are we so sure that the Earth is the center of the Universe that we don't need to look through Galileo's telescope?

We don't have to become Creationists to see evolutionary theory for the cobbled up mess that it is.  After all, Creationism has even less evidence in its favor than evolution.  AT some point, we must collectively admit that scientific materialism is a failure because it is just as dogmatic and inflexible as the religious system it replaced.  It is time to allow open and serious inquiry into all aspects of human existence.  It is time to entertain ideas such as extraterrestrial genetic manipulation, or the non-local Mind, or immaterial phenomena such as ESP and remote viewing.  The only reason we cling to deeply flawed ideas like evolution is because we are afraid to admit that there may be a vast part of existence that cannot be explained by purely mechanical/material means.

If we believe, as many people do, that humans (and any other life) are much more than the sum of their parts, then we must pursue that line of inquiry wherever it leads.  Ideas such as social darwinism, which are natural conclusions of materialistic reasoning, have had a devastating effect on humanity, justifying the crumbling system of economics and finance that is this moment causing great suffering among humans globally.

If the results are any indication of the soundness of ideas, then evolution is a major failure.  It has failed to improve the human condition, and in fact has undone millennia of advances in social structure.  At least the religious paradigm gave us dignity and self-worth.  Evolution only debases the human creature and reduces us to electro-chemical impulses.

Perhaps a new paradigm would allow us to toss the medieval idea that humans are the pinnacle of creation and that maybe self-awareness and self-determination exists in many forms throughout our Universe.

Just 20 years ago, we knew of only nine planets in the entire Universe.  At this moment, there are nealy 900 cataloged planets, with 18,000 awaiting confirmation, and an estimated 400 billion just in our galaxy.  Five hundred years ago, Galileo was excommunicated and placed under house arrest until his death for even suggesting that objects could revolve around something other than Earth.

Old paradigms die hard, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't question their underlying assumptions daily, if possible.

The human species cannot reach its full potential, and might even kill itself off, if we don't base our civilization on truth and the quest for real understanding.  Our self-imposed blinders are a liability we can no longer afford.  The risk is too high, including the demise of our species.

In the ideal scientific process, if any evidence is found that contradicts the hypothesis, then the hypothesis is false and we must find a new way to understand natural phenomena.

What assumptions do you make every day?  And when was the last time you examined them closely?  If you assume that traffic is quiet on Sunday morning, then one Sunday you are going to get squashed because you didn't verify what you thought you knew.